Did Trump Really Mean What He Said?

Pearl
Duncan is completing a book about DNA and ancestry with the title:
“DNA Surprise: Rebel Great, Great Ancestors.”

Here’s
what he said: “Human
trafficking is worse now that it has ever been in the history of the
world.” Really?

On
Friday afternoon, July 28, 2017, before the rain started on a rainy
day, President Donald Trump spoke in front of a group of law
enforcement officers in Long Island, New York. He spoke words that
many Americans do not know, do not want to hear, want to forget, or
choose not to remember.

I
respond now, because details of his speech have been fact-checked in
the American press, but not this detail. Yes he spoke about current
law enforcement activity against gang violence and illegal
immigration, and he repeated details in his stump speech, but one raw
detail in his speech calls into question how he defines America’s
history and world’s history.

Details
of his speech such as how he said officers should violate the
American rule of law, that all arrestees are innocent until proven
guilty in a court, and he recommends that officers should “rough
up” anyone they arrest who is accused of a crime – and other
details about the previous administration, trade, the economy and
what he said about healthcare and crowd size were fact-checked –
but not the embarrassing words, as an American, he uttered about
human trafficking.

In our
time, human trafficking is a despicable evil, and we are working to
erase it. The more we see and hear about the suffering, abuse and
deaths at the hands of traffickers, the more we understand
traffickers in our time and traffickers in the past. But President
Trump wants the world to know that he does not recognize or accept
the historical information about traffickers in the past.
Unfortunately, neither does the American press, because twenty-four
hours after his outrageous comments, only two publications that I saw
– two international publications: The
Week,
a UK publication and CNN international, fact-checked his details
about human trafficking.

The
President said: "Human traffickers. This is a term that's been
going on from the beginning of time, and they say it's worse now than
it ever was." Who the people are who said this he does not say,
but he goes on to describe the time period of which he speaks. He
said, "You go back 1,000 years, where you think of human
trafficking, you go back 500 years, 200 years, 100 years, human
trafficking, they say – think of it, what they do – human
trafficking is worse now, maybe, than it's ever been in the history
of this world."

Human
trafficking is worse now that it has ever been in the history of the
world? An American said that. An American leader said that. We
should hang out heads in shame in front of the world.

Yes,
trafficking – stealing humans, selling them, transporting them
across borders, using them as sex slaves and as instruments of
breeding for profit, forcing them to work for free until they get
sick and or die, denying their humanity – is increasing, and is an
outrage. The National Human Trafficking Hotline reported that in
2016, there were about 7,500
cases in America. This rising tide is up from about 5,500 in 2015.
We must stomp it out, but we cannot at any time forget the history of
human trafficking in the Americas.

Historians
say from the beginning of the slave trade in the 1600s, when
Europeans perpetrated the Atlantic Slave Trade, transporting humans
from Africa to the Americas, 12.5 million humans were trafficked
across the waters, from Africa to North America to the Caribbean and
to South America. Population geneticists say this was the largest
trade in humans from one continent to another. So for any American
to forget that number and to say the current trade is worse than it
has even been in history is atrocious. Is despicable. Is false. Is
a conscious distortion of history. Is a vile misuse of the world’s
bully pulpit. I know how deliberate these actions are, because as a
writer who has been writing about African American enslaved
ancestors, I heard from the publishers.

One
major editor at a leading publishing house wrote to my previous
agent, saying, American readers know Ms. Duncan’s ancestors as
slaves, as victims. They will not accept her portrayal of them as
heroes.

I
found ancestors in the Caribbean who were Maroon rebels who fought
against slavery, against human trafficking. I found ancestors in
villages in Ghana who resisted slave traders at the beginning of the
second millennia. I found ancestors in African mountain villages who
resisted human trafficking by other Africans as well as by the more
militant European slave traders who came equipped with guns and war
ships. I found ancestors who rebelled in colonial New York, and who
were black and white abolitionists who fought human trafficking in
America and the Caribbean.

But
as Trump, two years ago in July 2015, said about Senator John McCain,
who was a war hero, a prisoner-of-war hero, deriding him, saying, “He
was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t
captured,” we have to continue to examine how we describe heroes
and courage. Some
of us consciously define heroes, victims and survivors differently
from others.

Americans
are redefining what we mean by strong and weak, by hero and victim,
by prideful and shameful. This was a shameful denial of American
history. Shameful.